The Book of the Dead, Guardian of Immortality
Once she came in contact with the outside world, first through expansion and trade and then through conquest by the Greeks and Romans, it was Egypt who influenced the shape and materials of the books of others.
—Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script, and Books
To me, the most interesting thing about the Book of the Dead is that it is thoroughly Egyptian in origin. After its transition from coffin painting to paper, it was typically produced and sold by priests to Egyptians who could afford it as a scroll.* By contrast, the Bible began life as a papyrus codex (a book made by cutting a roll into pages before inscribing the pages and then sewing them together) and persisted thereafter in bound-book form, the form familiar to us today. The early Christians in Egypt would use local paper, but those in Europe and the Mideast would have had to have their papyrus paper imported from Egypt where the plant thrived.
Since the days of the pharaohs, however, Egypt’s wetlands and papyrus fields have been drained and decimated. Even in the summer of 1798, once Vivant Denon had landed in Egypt with Bonaparte’s expedition, he saw no papyrus plants anywhere on the Nile, since by then it had been ripped out to make way for food crops. But, at least he could recall what the plant looked like from seeing it in Sicily twenty years earlier, when he spent time there as a young diplomat. Arab traders had planted papyrus there years before and left it to grow wild. While Denon was stationed in Naples in the 1770’s and 80’s in the service of His Majesty, Louis XVI, he was often engaged in the study of antiquity and wrote an account of his Italian tour. He held a noble title, Chevalier de Non, at this time; it was only after the French Revolution that he took on the more plebian name, Vivant Denon. On tour in Sicily, he looked forward to his trip along the Sicilian rivers where papyrus grows even today. “That celebrated and curious plant . . . I was extremely anxious to see, handle, and make myself acquainted with . . . then in its greatest beauty.”
One important conclusion he must have come to in Egypt was that since papyrus had been missing for such a long time, it meant that any papyrus paper that he or his colleagues recovered would have had to come from some ancient source. Denon went on to bigger and better things and in the process, he must have seen many scrolls and pieces of paper made from the plant, but he was left in the dark all his life as to what was contained in the world’s first paper book.
In our case, we are lucky because a comprehensive history and interpretation of the Book of the Dead was recently assembled in 2010 as a catalog for several major exhibitions including one at the British Museum by John Taylor, assistant keeper of Egyptian archaeology.1 Taylor’s book, “Journey through the Afterlife: Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead,” illustrates the evolution of the Book of the Dead text and shows how court authorities, military leaders, and others usurped the privilege from the pharaohs. By then, in the New Kingdom, the idea of the Book of the Dead became fashionable and accessible to common folk, though in practice it was still an expensive opportunity, one that only some could afford. Its appeal was that it had been the exclusive right of kings and thus had the royal seal of approval. If it worked for Ramses, it would work for anyone.
Dr. Foy Scalf, head of Research Archives at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute, pointed out that the kings themselves did not bother with paper versions of the Book of the Dead.2 Even the well-equipped King Tut’s tomb lacked any funerary papyri.3 Instead, the royals seemed to have preferred their books drawn, painted, or cut into their tomb walls, coffins, or other objects; all of which must have cost time, money, and patience. For lesser mortals, papyrus paper came to the rescue, and just as a model of a boat would do in place of the real thing, a scroll would serve in place of a costly and time-consuming project of tomb decoration.
Papyrus paper was found to be the perfect medium for writing out the Book of the Dead because, unlike tomb walls or coffin surfaces, it could literally be cut and pasted. Adding pictures to the text could be done cheaply and more easily on paper with a reed pen and colored inks. For a while, the linen wrappings used as shrouds were inscribed, especially during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Dynasties, 1580–1425 B.C. Sometimes during this period, the deceased was provided with two separate books: one on paper and one on cloth. But the flexible, woven-cloth surface was a difficult medium and papyrus paper thereafter came to prominence. In fact, it soon became clear that paper versions of the Book of the Dead were serving as the prototype for copying spells onto new coffins for those who insisted on the “old-fashioned” royal tradition.4
Embellishing the text with pictures was a boon for those who did not read hieroglyphics; which, according to some, was a significant portion of the population.5 Each copy was personalized depending on the purchaser’s selection. For a price, the priests and scribes would help you organize it. And so a new business was launched. The priests proved that they were essential for the job because they kept up with the continuing research that was almost certain to uncover any hitherto unrecognized danger in the underworld. In concert with the necromancers and soothsayers the priests studid oracles, augury, astrology, and magic signs from nature in order to better understand what might await you in the afterlife.
They could also produce a simple, uniform version that would perhaps do the job cheaply but, in order to be certain, they recommended a tome that was guaranteed to deal with any peril whatsoever, though it would cost you a small fortune.
Papyrus would allow one to get started on the path to immortality. Even if you had yet to buy a tomb, or perhaps would never even be able to afford one, you could at least commission a scroll and have it prepared with care. The finished product would not only show people that you were serious about living on after death, it would also reflect to a limited degree something of your personality.
Once Vivant and his fellow savants from Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition sailed away with their acquisitions, and once Champollion had deciphered the hieroglyphic puzzle using the Rosetta Stone, Europe and Britain were seized with Egyptomania. Napoleon and Champollion proved to all that ancient Egypt had been an extraordinary place and still had much to offer the world. As a result, Egypt became a land of opportunity for souvenir hunters and the “Rape of the Nile” began in earnest. Armed with hammers and chisels, amateur and professional collectors arrived to take advantage and follow in the footsteps of Prisse. During the winter of 1889–1890, almost 11,000 tourists visited Cairo, 1,300 of whom went up the Nile. Ten years later, the number of visitors per year increased to 50,000.6
Among the visitors in 1887 was young Wallis Budge, an assistant keeper, second class, from the British Museum. He had made a visit to Egypt the previous year when he worked at a dig in Aswan. He came away from that with a large number of cases that he shipped home under the cloak of “military baggage,” and was therefore exempt from inspection. In all, on his very first collecting trip, Budge brought 1,482 items home to England, and this was just a start. Is it any wonder that on his scond trip the Service of Antiquities set a police watch over him?
On this second collecting trip, he went by river steamer to Aswan as if to tour the region. Once his escort landed he slipped back on board, stayed in a cabin that night, then sailed early the next morning, arriving in Luxor just as the sun was setting. He lingered in his cabin until nightfall then went ashore and walked quickly through the darkened streets of Luxor, the Mecca of the antiquities trade. Here he meet with some dealer friends. Staying clear of the town police, he traveled across the river in a small boat to a tomb on the west bank where friendly fellahin were waiting. It was all done quickly, efficiently, and in the dark. Arriving at the site, he was offered a rich store of rare objects, among them the largest roll of papyrus he had ever seen. The roll was tied round with a thick band made of papyrus string, and was in a perfect state of preservation. It lay in a niche in the north wall of a sarcophagus chamber with its clay seal unbroken.
In his autobiography, Budge confesses that it seemed like sacrilege to break the seal and untie the cord but, like Denon before him, he quickly overcame his scruples and unrolled a few feet, an inch or so at a time.7 He was amazed at the beauty and freshness of the colors. In the dim light of the candles and the hot air of the tomb, the illustrated human figures and animals almost came to life. The first scene on the scroll was that of the Judgment of the Soul, from which he knew he had just bought a large and complete text of the Per-em-hru, or Book of the Dead Man.
The magnificent roll had been written, drawn, and painted for Ani, a royal scribe, “registrar of the offerings of all the Gods, overseer of the granaries of the Lords of Abydos, and scribe of the offerings of the Lords of Thebes.” When the papyrus was unrolled in London, the inscribed portion of it was found to be seventy-eight feet long, and at each end was a section of blank papyrus about two feet long.
That same evening, he was also offered a papyrus of the priestess Anhai, a papyrus codex of the Book of the Dead written by Nu in the Eighteenth Dynasty and a leather roll containing chapters of the Book of the Dead, with beautifully painted vignettes. In one stroke he had come into possession of four rare and extremely valuable objects. What followed next was an adventure as exciting as anything experienced by Indiana Jones, and it demonstrates what separated Budge from the rest of the pack.
On arrival back in town at dawn with his four treasures, he stopped to pick up some tin boxes that he had ordered beforehand, a move that makes one think his acquisitions were not a complete surprise. He seems to have known the dimensions of the “Sacred Four” beforehand. He then went on to a dealer’s house for breakfast, at which point he learned that police and soldiers had arrived in town with orders to take possession of every house containing antiquities in Luxor and to arrest their owners, as well as Wallis Budge.
Budge asked to see the warrants and was told that Monsieur Grebaut the head of antiquities was delayed; he would produce them later in the day. Since nothing else could be done, they finished breakfast, after which Budge told the police that he would not leave town and he was therefore allowed to go about his business. Meanwhile they took possession of the house, posted watchmen on the roof, and a sentry at each corner of the building. Then they went to several other houses and did the same.
Among the houses that were sealed and guarded was a small house where Budge had stored his tins containing the precious papyri. This house abutted the wall of the garden of the Luxor Hotel. In this same house were several cases of things that belonged to dealers in town, who used it as a safe place for storage. When the Luxor dealers saw it sealed up and guards posted, they invited the guards to drink cognac with them. Then they tried to bribe them to go away for an hour; but the guards stoutly refused to drink or to leave their posts.
Regarding the hotel, the Cook’s Tourists’ Handbook for Egypt, the Nile, and the Desert of 1897 tells us that “the Luxor Hotel grounds are spacious and shaded, adjoining a farm cultivated to supply visitors with dairy, produce, poultry, sheep, and bullocks. A qualified medical gentleman, a clergyman of the Church of England, and an English lady housekeeper reside in the hotel during winter.”
If you were a British tourist intent on staying the winter in Egypt, that information would have been critical, but in the case of the distraught local antiquities dealers, the bucolic location of the hotel had another significance. They went and had an interview with the manager and, according to Budge, the result of their conversation was that at about sunset, a number of gardeners and workmen appeared with digging tools and baskets. They dug under that part of the garden wall that was next to the house and right through into the basement. According to Budge,
“they made scarcely any noise, and they cut through the soft, unbaked mud bricks without difficulty. Whilst they were digging I watched the work with the manager. It seemed to me that the gardeners were particularly skilled housebreakers, and that they must have had much practice. It appears incredible, but the whole of the digging was carried out without the knowledge of the watchmen on the roof of the house and the sentries outside it. But it seemed unwise to rely overmuch on the silence of our operations, and we therefore arranged to give the police and the sentry a meal, for they were both hungry and thirsty. M. Pagnon, the proprietor of the hotel, had a substantial supper prepared for them, i.e., half a sheep boiled, with several pounds of rice, and served up in pieces with sliced lemons and raisins on a huge brass tray.” (E.A.W. Budge, “By Nile and Tigris.”)
Budge then tells us that, whilst the police were eating happily, man after man went into the building and carried everything out, piece by piece and box by box, and “in this way we saved the Papyrus of Ani, and all the rest of my acquisitions, from the officials of the Service of Antiquities, and all Luxor rejoiced.”
The Papyrus of Ani remains the most famous of all papyrus scrolls yet found and is still the longest one known of the Theban period. Other long papyri are: the Harris Papyrus extolling Ramesses III (Twentieth Dynasty), 133 feet; the Greenfield Papyrus (Twentieth Dynasty), 121 feet; the Papyrus of Nebseni (Eighteenth Dynasty), 76 feet; the Leyden Papyrus of Qenna (Eighteenth Dynasty), 50 feet; the Dublin Papyrus (Eighteenth Dynasty), 24 feet; and the Papyrus of Hunefer (Nineteenth Dynasty) 18 feet.
Unfortunately, many of these early scrolls were cut into smaller sections for ease of handling and are no longer intact. Two of the few long papyri on display are the sixty-three-foot Book of the Dead of the priest of Horus, Imouthes (Imhotep) at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the twenty-four-foot recently restored scroll of Sobekmose, the Goldworker of Amun, at the Brooklyn Museum (consisting of eight large sections, conservation work was completed in 2011); several are also on display in the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy. The Book of the Dead discovered by Budge and referred to as the Ani Papyrus is still artistically the best example. It dealt with Ani and his wife, Tutu. Ani was more than just a royal scribe, he was also governor of the large granary at Abydos as well as a registrar and scribe of the sacred property of the lords of Thebes, which included keeping track of the temple property in Thebes. His wife was also an important person, being a priestess. Since she is mentioned in the text, presumably Tutu had preceded Ani in death and her mummified body would be waiting in his tomb. In real life the next step after composing his book would be the process of selecting and storing funerary furniture and assembling shabti figures, models of the people who would do the daily menial work for Ani and Tutu in the hereafter. The minimum needed would be 365, since the Egyptian year was the same as ours.
The whole process described in the Book of the Dead in many ways resembles the rite of the Christian baptism. In fact, when performed for deceased royalty, the Egyptian rituals of purification were known as the “Baptism of the Pharaoh,” and ensured that Pharaoh started his new life after death with a pure heart and a clean body.
In the last part of Ani’s Book of the Dead, Ani and Tutu have entered heaven, a heaven that differed considerably from the heaven or paradise of Muslim, Christian, or modern Egyptian traditions. In place of palatial residences, virgins, angels, soft fluffy clouds, etc., our Intrepid Pair were content to be forever in a celestial papyrus swamp, a marshy place in which all the good times and the most precious things of this life are extended infinitely. It was a haven where the blessed dead and their old friends could regale themselves, and where food and drink of every sort would be provided “in degrees of abundance beyond their imagination.” And the Ani Papyrus proves yet again the value the Egyptians placed on the papyrus plant and the swamps it grew in. What greater glory could be ascribed to a plant than to have it next to you in paradise?
According to Taylor, an authority on the subject, the earlier Pyramid Texts describe the Winding Waterway, which divides the sky into the northern Field of Offerings and the southern Field of Reeds (or Sekhet-A’aru) a place where “the deceased was purified before ascending to the sky.”8 In later Coffin Texts, the Field of Reeds became the destination of the deceased and this was carried over into the papyrus paper scrolls, the portable version of the Book that found its way into commoners’ tombs. It was a celestial marsh similar to the papyrus swamps still found here on Earth. “Here was the abode of the god Osiris, who bestowed estates in it upon those who had been his followers, and here the beatified dead led a new existence and regaled themselves upon food of every kind, which was given to them in abundance.”
The ancient drawings of it that appeared in many copies of the Book of the Dead has been compared to the Elysian Fields of the Greeks,9 but Taylor reminds us that the drawings are not maps in the modern sense; they represent imaginary places. Surprisingly, however, they do resemble the watercourses that still flow through the largest papyrus swamps that flourish in Africa today. One glance at the modern areal photos of the enormous papyrus swamps found in South Sudan and the smaller inland papyrus swamps in Botswana tells the story. Their similarity to the ancient drawing of the Field of Reeds with its meandering waterways is striking.